Classical homeschooling in Southern California

Popsicle stick alphabet

Green Bubbles just does not enjoy certain activities that he has no interest in. While I normally would just let it pass and move on, we’re almost done with our kindergarten year and knowing the alphabet has become my major goal. He knows his ABC song, but for some reason kept skipping the middle. When he sang it he would sing “A B C D E G F.. Q R S T U V”. Nothing I’ve been doing this year so far seemed to be working, and I’ve tried a LOT of different games.

We have a huge box of 1000 Popsicle sticks that haven’t been getting much use. I recently decided to pull them out and, picking out 52 sticks, I wrote the entire alphabet, both capital and lower case letters, on the sticks. This was probably the best idea I’ve ever had.

The first day I showed them to Green Bubbles I pulled out the capital letters only. I mixed them all up in random order and told him to sing the alphabet song with me. It went something like this.. “X Y D E F M U..” He laughed hysterically and told me I had it all wrong and then, on his own, fixed it for me. I did nothing to correct him and allowed him to figure it out all by himself. So when he did his typical and skipped H and went straight to Q, I let him. By the time he got to Z I congratulated him on fixing the alphabet but pointed out all the extra sticks we had that someone didn’t make it in. He figured out his mistake all on his own and put the missing letters back into the alphabet.

Something about having those missing letters has a physical item he could see and touch seems to have made all the difference! He still occasionally says Q instead of H, but most of the time catches himself right away and fixes it himself. He’s very aware and thinks before singing that part now, and it’s starting to come a lot more naturally.

There are so many other games you can play with these as well! We’ve done the same game with lowercase letters, matching lower to uppercase letters. We’ve even used the Popsicle stick letters to spell out short words (more on this later!).

Hopefully this helps someone else who might need a little nudge in the alphabet department. The hands on wooden sticks did something that little pieces of paper, alphabet charts, songs, file folder games and numerous other games couldn’t.